Build It: A Cheap Gaming Desktop

By
Matthew Murray29 Dec 2010, 5 a.m.

Giving gifts to family and friends isn't the most frustrating part of the holiday season—that would be watching them get exchanged or, even worse, gather dust. Watching a present you picked out with thought and care land with a resounding thud when its wrapping is yanked away (or soon after) can be so upsetting, you may be driven to drown your disappointment in leftover eggnog.

Such troubles are only exacerbated when giving the gift of technology: How can you know for sure that your best guess topped the recipient's wish list and won't be good only for holding down the floorboards in another few months? The best insurance against obsolescence when you're giving a computer is to spend what you can to get the most your budget will allow now, while also making sure the system—and its intended user—have room to grow.

The best way to do that is to build it yourself. There are other advantages to this, too: You get to intimately personalize the computer you put together; you get the pleasure of giving away something you crafted with your own hands; and, if you're going this route for a child, assembling it with him or her can be both major-league quality time and a valuable learning experience—for both of you. If the final system is something everyone can enjoy, well, so much the better.

With that in mind, we decided to spec out a gaming system that would do justice to recently released titles a bit more intense than merely the World of Warcraft and FarmVille variety. We chose a maximum of $850: That's more than enough money, but it's also little enough that we knew we wouldn't be able to go wild—we still had other people to shop for. And it also meant that we had to be really smart about picking components so that, in another six months or a year, when we had more money to spend and technology had advanced forward another mile or two, we'd be able to swap out a few crucial pieces and still have a darn good system.

Elemental to our money-saving strategy was the processor. We wanted something that would be powerful for games and other kinds of applications, but it had to be reasonably priced. CPUs can cost as much as $1,000 just by themselves, and many of the most expensive ones are worth the money, but we didn't want to go there. We selected an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T, for $179: Its six processing cores would give it choice multithreading capabilities, and though its 2.8-GHz clock speed isn't exactly slow, there are even faster six-core chips we'll have the opportunity to upgrade to later.

Leaving that upgrade path open is easy with AMD, as almost all of the company's processors can be used in any motherboard, from the least-expensive budget offerings to the priciest enthusiast parts. It's easy to lose your head with motherboards, too, so we stuck with an upper-midrange model from MSI, the 890GXM-G65, which uses AMD's gaming-oriented 890GX chipset. There were a couple of significant benefits to this. Sure, the two PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slots are nice, for reasons we'll get to presently, but we caught an outstanding deal on Newegg: The 890GXM-G65, originally $129.99, was marked down to $119.99, had a $20-off promotional code offer, and included a $10 rebate. This meant we could get this motherboard for only $89.99—a terrific deal.

Of course, when you're compiling a gaming system, the video card just may be the most important element. It certainly has the most immediate impact on the performance of 3D games, but it can also make or break your entire budget. Unfortunately, with video cards, you almost invariably get your money's worth, and we knew we couldn't justify spending upwards of $500 on one of the best cards in the market. Luckily, AMD and Nvidia have been engaged in a fierce competition for the $200 space ever since Nvidia released its GeForce GTX 460 this past summer. AMD retaliated a couple of weeks ago with the Radeon HD 6850, which offers comparable power at a comparable price ($199.99). In our tests, the two cards ran essentially neck and neck, but we went with the AMD, in no small part because our motherboard's two PCIe x16 slots will let us add a second card later for a major 3D boost without having to even break $400. Expandability: It's a good thing.

For everything else, we knew we'd have to stick with sensible, even safe, choices that would give us a solid framework—but might not blow us away. So we grabbed 4GB of OCZ RAM for $59.99; two sticks would let us get a nice performance boost from the motherboard's dual-channel memory configuration. The hard drive was a straightforward WD 1TB model ($69.99), the optical drive a basic Lite-On DVD burner ($19.99). Our power supply was destined to be a middle-of-the-road Thermaltake, not just because its 600 watts would be more than enough now and for the foreseeable future, but because a $20 rebate meant we'd only need to shell out $49.99. The operating system had to be the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium ($94.99)—there's not really any way to skimp on that. But we did allow ourselves a bit of personality with the case: The NZXT Vulcan ($69.99) is a smaller model, but it would have no trouble housing our modestly sized components, and it's got a built-in handle that makes it easy to carry the computer from place to place.

When we were finished, we'd been able to craft a more-than-respectable gaming system for a grand total of $837.92—well under our $850 goal. The money we saved doing this ourselves means we'll get to spread a bit more holiday joy to others, as well save more down the line because we can safely upgrade individual parts rather than buying everything again from scratch. That means that the forethought and research we invested into this project now will make the next holiday season, and the one (and maybe even two or three) after that, that much merrier. If that doesn't rate a hearty "Ho ho ho!", what does?

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About the Author

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been building computers for himself and others for more than 20 years, and he spent several years working in IT and helpdesk capacities before escaping into the far more exciting world of journalism. Currently the managing editor of Hardware for PCMag, Matthew has fulfilled a number of other positions at Ziff Davis, including lead analyst of ... See Full Bio